By Movieguide® Staff
Bethany Joy Lenz spent a decade inside what she now calls a cult, and the woman who emerged didn’t just walk back to Jesus — she had to learn how to think about Him all over again.
“The only reason I’m still a Christian today is because, 10 years ago, after many years of faith being used against me as a tool of manipulation, Tim Keller taught me how to re-build my faith using reason and logic,” the ONE TREE HILL actress wrote on Instagram after the pastor’s death in 2023.
That rebuilt faith now shapes the work she chooses, including her newest role in HOPE VALLEY: 1874, the Hallmark+ prequel to WHEN CALLS THE HEART. Lenz plays Rebecca Clarke, a widowed mother who hauls her 11-year-old daughter across the Western Canadian frontier in a covered wagon and a borrowed dose of stubbornness.
Related: HOPE VALLEY: 1874: Episode 1.1
The series premiered Saturday, March 21, with new episodes dropping Thursdays exclusively on Hallmark+. Lenz stars opposite Benjamin Ayres, Jill Hennessy, Roan Curtis and young Mila Morgan in a story she said appealed to her on more than one front.
“What actor doesn’t dream of working with a community that’s been proven to be supportive and a wonderful place to work,” Lenz told Parade of the show’s fan base, known as The Hearties. “I’ve got friends on set and in the area. So there was so much about this role that felt like it was right for me.”
The Hallmark pivot is no accident for an actress remaking her public life around what she actually believes. Lenz, 43, escaped the Big House Family community a decade ago — a group she has described as spiritually abusive and financially ruinous — and chronicled the ordeal in the New York Times bestseller Dinner for Vampires: Life on a Cult TV Show (While Also in an Actual Cult!), published in October 2024.
Movieguide® has followed Lenz’s testimony for several years, including her September 2025 appearance on the “Jesus Calling” podcast, where she traced how the exit reset her relationship with God. “I refused to allow [my daughter] to experience this, and that’s when I got out, got into therapy, and my whole relationship with the Lord completely shifted at that point,” she said.
The new shape of that relationship, Lenz says, doesn’t flinch at hard questions. “You need your brain in order to have faith. God is so big. He’s not afraid of us thinking,” she told the podcast. “The more you think, the more you understand, the more Christianity makes sense out of everything else in the world.”
Lenz has carried that conviction onto Instagram, where she posts to her followers about spiritual abuse, gaslighting and recovery alongside the usual updates from her music and acting work. She is candid about how badly the old framework served her.
“It was a totally false version of the gospel,” she said of her cult years on the same podcast. “It was the counterfeit which put me in the driver’s seat of earning my happy life that I thought God owed me.”
A real faith took its place — and a different kind of work has followed. Where Lenz once shot ONE TREE HILL by day and answered to a controlling community by night, she now picks up scripts like HOPE VALLEY: 1874, a story about a widow trusting strangers slowly and building something honest from scratch.
“It’s about building trust in a time when so many people were strangers,” Lenz told Parade about Rebecca. “You really have to trust your gut, watch somebody, and let the thing grow and slowly build.”
Hearties, meet your new heroine. She knows a thing or two about starting over.
Read Next: HOPE VALLEY: 1874 Is All About Community…’Literally’
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